Oranges Rant

Okay I’m in the library and I’m working but I’m so worked up that I can’t continue to work until I work this out.

I just read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winters. It was good, I enjoyed it. But beyond the text itself is a quagmire of frustrations. The book is about a young woman who is training to be a missionary/preacher but falls in love and has a sexual relationship with another young woman whom she converted. To put it bluntly, under its humor, it’s a religion-bashing book, specifically Pentecostal Christianity, which, in the text itself, was okay. As a Christian, I was never at any point so offended that I couldn’t read any further. It is told from the perspective of an insider, someone who grew up in that environment, and it is by turns funny and sad and I actually relate on some level to many of the church experiences described.

The problem comes with the author herself, and her critics.

I read the introduction because I’m that kind of person, and I almost wish I hadn’t. She claimed without apology that she was making a breakthrough in literature, that she was boldly going where no author has gone before, that she was reinventing the novel and saving her readers from the soul-sucking mundanity of bad art. This just put me off. She reminds me of Kubrick. I respect the work he’s done, but he was an arrogant, self-centered bastard as far as I can tell, and I can’t bring myself to respect him outside of his body of work. It’s a difficult line to balance, and a frustrating one.

I am beginning to feel similarly about Jeanette Winters. And her drooling fans fan the flames of my ire. In his horribly misspelled and grammatically nauseating little booklet So Far So Linear: responses to the work of Jeanette Winterson, Christopher Pressler states:

“One of the strongest ingredients in Winterson’s novels and interviews is how self-made, self-created she is. She has never sought her biological mother. Winterson projects herself as a kind of genetic zero with no parents, no gene source. She is her own conspiracy theory, her own experiment, her own meteorite” (4).

Well all right. Cool. Good for her, she’s an island. Yay.

Another critic, Sonia Front, says that:

“I discuss Winterson’s repudiation of the male discourse which colonizes the female body and the way she reenvisages the erotic routes on the body in non-phallic terms.”

So it’s all about sex. And being angry. As far as I can tell, both the book and the critics are not trying to prove that homosexuality is better, they are trying to get even with the heterosexually dominant past. In the book, which is pseudo-autobiographical, “Jeanette” the character has sex with her 16-year-old friend Melanie, and then when Melanie is taken away/chooses to leave after they are found out, Jeanette has sex with a much older woman from her town and narrates, “I hated it. I hated it and I couldn’t stop.” (That is a rough quotation, the book is not in front of me at the moment) Later, she has sex with a girl she converted in her church.

Whether homosexuality is the issue or not, none of this stuff seems to have very much to do with love. Her relationships are described primarily in terms of the physical, and none of them last, whether by choice or force. She is, in my reading of the story, as promiscuous and destructive as a lesbian as any heterosexual teenage girl who sleeps around with boys. Throw some Christianity in there and you’ve got a hot-bed of getting back at the world in literary form.

I must say, again, that I actually did enjoy the book. On its own terms, apart from its creator and its critics, it was thought-provoking. But the way it is being manipulated for various agendas is kind of disgusting. I keep seeing in my mind a mob worked into a frenzy, and it is an ugly image. All of these essays have to do with the erotic, eroticization of food, eroticization of language, eroticization of religion. Eroticism without love, though… Who really cares if you’re being erotic with a man or a woman, then? The point is to get something out of them, to take something, some satisfaction. I’m just sad reading through all these angry essays because it seems like everyone is missing the point.

Luckily, my essay has to do with pseudo-autobiography, not sexuality, so I will to try reign in my displeasure in order to focus on the relevant aspects. And while sexuality may be relevant to her story, it is not inherently relevant to all stories, or all historiographic metaficitons. So, that is my Oranges rant.